Mourning, Spirituality and Psychic Change: A New Object Relations View of Psychoanalysis

by Kavaler-Adler,Susan

• ISBN13: 9781583912942
• ISBN10: 1583912940
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2003-09-19
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In her earlier books, Susan Kavaler-Adler identified healthy mourning for traumas and life changes as an essential aspect of successful analysis, and drew the distinction between a healthy acceptance of mourning as part of development and pathological mourning, which 'fixes' a patient at an unhealthy stage of development. This new book brings such distinctions into the consulting room, exploring how a successful analyst can help patients to utilise mourning for past troubles to move them forward to a lasting change for the better, emotionally, psychically and erotically. The author also tackles the controversial issue of spirituality in psychoanalysis, and explores how psychoanalysis can help patients come to terms with difficult issues in a time of great psychic and spiritual disturbance. These themes are brought to life via 2 richly detailed case studies.

Table of Contents

Dedications	vii
Preface	ix
Foreword by Dr Joyce McDougall	xi
Acknowledgements	xiii
1 Introduction	1	(3)
2 A new metapsychology for clinical phenomenology and psychic health	4	(21)
3 A phenomenological theory of developmental mourning	25	(21)
4 Mourning as explicit and implicit in psychoanalytic theory: Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Ronald Fairbairn	46	(22)
5 Mourning as implicit and explicit in psychoanalytic theory: John Bowlby, Michael Balint, and D.W. Winnicott	68	(13)
6 The case of June, Part 1: Finding a new identity through the mourning of traumatic loss and guilt, primal rage, and poignant regret	81	(29)
7 The case of June, Part 2: A mournful and spiritual journey: spiritual and sexual evolution	110	(30)
8 June's evolution in later years of treatment: Transformation through mourning in developmental, transference, and life change terms	140	(9)
9 The case of Phillip, Part 1: Seven generations of grief	149	(21)
10 The case of Phillip, Part 2: The spiritual evolution	170	(23)
11 The case of Laura, Part 1: Mourning as the poetry of female eroticism: homoerotic evolutions of a homosexual woman within developmental mourning	193	(27)
12 The case of Laura, Part 2: Strands and cycles of mourning and unrequited love: modes of mourning	220	(22)
13 Mourning and creativity: A journey through a male artist's development	242	(11)
14 The divine, the deviant and the diabolical: A journey through a female artist's paintings during her participation in a creative process group	253	(19)
15 Conclusion	272	(9)
Notes	281	(2)
References	283	(4)
Index	287